High court orders state to release prisoners

The United States Supreme Court ruled Monday that the State of California must reduce its prison population by releasing or transferring prisoners to local jails, complicating the dilemma the Mendocino County Jail already faces in light of the state's intention to release prisoners to local jails to ease state budget pain, according to Mendocino County Sheriff Tom Allman.

About 33,000 state prisoners will be released or transferred statewide, after the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday upheld two class-action lawsuits, filed in 1990 and 2001, claiming the state's prisons are overcrowded and provide inadequate care for prisoners with serious mental illnesses and serious medical conditions.

After an hourlong conference with the state secretary of the Department of Corrections, Allman said, "he assured us that they were not shipping people back to us immediately. They are going to slowly acclimate us to where the court told us we need to be in the next 24 months."

Questions remain unanswered, including how many prisoners will be transferred to Mendocino County, the criteria for prisoners to be released, whether the state will reimburse local jails and to what degree.

"The governor has said the state is not going to do this without funding; we have not heard anything about funding," Allman said.

The average cost to house an inmate in the county jail is $90 a day, according to Allman.

Allman also expects the release will cause strain on his depleted jail staff.

"I have 12 vacancies in the jail," he said. "This will mean there will be an immediate need to hire correctional officers."

The majority of the prisoners to be released are parole violators, according to Allman, and are typically sentenced to 90 days or fewer in state prison. The average stay in the county jail is about six months, he said.

"What we've done over the last eight months is we've lowered the jail population so that we now have about 125 empty beds," Allman said, noting that the Monday Supreme Court ruling was "not a surprise."

He expects that Mendocino County will start to see the effects of the court's decision in less than three months as people arrested in the county for felonies are housed in the county jail instead of being sent to state prisons.

Allman criteria for prisoners to be released is expected in about a month.

On the up side, "local jails are going to have more of their county felony violators and will be assisting in their re-entry into the community," Allman said, a process he noted will also require aid from the county's heavily-cut social services and mental health programs. "Local sheriffs are going to have a much more visible say in the re-enty process ... from incarceration into the community. I don't know a single sheriff in the state who would turn his back on a challenge, and this is a really big challenge."